Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  You did not come,

  And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb. –

  Yet less for loss of your dear presence there

  Than that I thus found lacking in your make

  That high compassion which can overbear

  Reluctance for pure lovingkindess’ sake

  Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,

  You did not come.

  You love not me,

  And love alone can lend you loyalty;

  – I know and knew it. But, unto the store

  Of human deeds divine in all but name,

  Was it not worth a little hour or more

  To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came

  To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be

  You love not me?

  It must have caused a pang of remorse to Mrs Henniker when she read it, if not in 1893 when it was written, then in 1902 when it was published. She was not a heartless woman by any means. Her stories, which tend towards the pathetic, show great sympathy for the unhappy and the unfortunate. The first story in her collection Outlines, published in 1894 and dedicated to ‘To my friend Thomas Hardy’, is a sad, sentimental piece called ‘A Statesman’s Lapse’. The central figures are a distinguished politician with an invalid wife and three children, and his wife’s young cousin, Aileen. The climactic scene takes place in the country, beside the Thames: he has gone to see his son’s future housemaster at Eton, taking Aileen with him.

  As by a lightning flash was revealed to this man and this woman an enchanted country untrodden as yet by the feet of either. Side by side they had unknowingly passed through the fateful gate. When they should retrace their steps the summer would be over in the land whence they came, the skies a chill expanse, the world a colourless plain. Yielding to an overmastering impulse, Gaspard Fludyer drew his companion towards him and kissed her, once only, on her cheek. She turned pale. Then he took her hand in his; and pressed first the fingers, then the little pink palm to his lips. She turned her head away, and he saw that she was crying. ‘Aileen – forgive me – I had no right to kiss you. But it is for once only – one little miserable caress for a whole lifetime! Think of that, my child, and don’t be angry with me. It will never be again.’

  She trembled from head to foot. He passed her hand within his arm, and they walked silently back, out of their solitude, away from their dying dream, into the discord of life once more.

  Mr Fludyer and Aileen part for ever. The passage gives an idea of her tone as a writer, which found admirers in her day. It is just possible that the story relates to a scene between the author and Hardy. He may have thought it did and enjoyed the idea of a secret literary link. He praised it, urging her to make it the title story and call the whole collection ‘A Statesman’s Lapse’ – advice she did not take. 8

  In September she was away in Ireland and then at her uncle Lord Crewe’s. Hardy was ‘a trifle chilled’ to hear that she was reading passages from his letters aloud to the house party, and he ‘much regretted having sent the effusive ones’. ‘I lost confidence in you somewhat,’ he told her. 9 Nothing could have made plainer the difference between his feeling for her and hers for him. She seemed to be showing him off as a conquest, just as Mrs Tomson had done. This time Hardy could not bring himself to break off the friendship and, having stated his objection, by the end of the letter had written himself back into being her friend again.

  In October they were collaborating on a story, ‘The Spectre of the Real’. It was Hardy’s idea, and the plot, involving a woman who believes herself to be a widow and is about to marry again when her husband reappears, was his, as was most of the narrative. He consulted her – as he had once consulted Emma – about womanly details: ‘please insert in pencil any details that I have omitted, and that would only be known to a woman.’ 10 He was now using a hired typist, Miss Tigan, rather than Emma, to make copies of his work, something that was likely to upset her, given everything else she could observe of his behaviour, movements and fluctuating moods. To cheer herself, perhaps, Emma borrowed or hired a horse and took to riding again. 11 She need not have felt too much literary jealousy at least. ‘The Spectre of the Real’ is a poor story, with a large element of Grand Guignol. It took a year to be published in a magazine and was reprinted by Mrs Henniker in a collection of her own work in 1896, when it got a drubbing from the critics. The Spectator called it gruesome and repulsive, and proof that Hardy was not a ‘judicious literary counsellor’. 12

  Accepting that he could hope for nothing more than friendship, Hardy worked assiduously at being a useful friend. He recommended her work to a magazine editor, who took one of her stories. He badgered the same editor to get a review of Outlines, ending his letter cynically, ‘This is log-rolling, is it not?’ Then he wrote an anonymous puff of her work in another magazine. 13 While this was going on, Emma began to interest herself in the suffrage cause and complained that Hardy’s interest in women’s suffrage was ‘nil’ and that he cared only about the women he invented. 14 At the same time Hardy, with protean energy, was engaged in writing Jude, and some of Emma’s bitterness was provoked by the fact that, whereas throughout their marriage he had consulted her, asked her to copy pages and showed her or read to her from each novel in progress, now for the first time he did none of this. 15 Instead he was discussing it with Mrs Henniker. He had started writing it about the time of their Winchester assignation, and when it was published he wrote to her. ‘My hesitating to send “Jude” was not because I thought you narrow – but because I had rather bored you with him during the writing of some of the story, or thought I had.’ 16 He had also asked her opinion at an early stage about the naming of the heroine, and she can’t have failed to notice that he added her name to Sue’s.

  Things settled down. A steady friendship was established on both sides; they continued to take an interest in each other’s work and to exchange letters, his more freely expressed and entertaining than any others he wrote. 17 She went to Emma’s parties in London, and in 1896 she introduced Hardy to her husband. Hardy decided to like him. Three years later, when Major Arthur Henniker was setting off for Africa to fight the Boers, Hardy wrote him a letter with the rather curious declaration that he regarded him as ‘the most perfect type of the practical soldier that I know’. He had received many glamorous photographs of Mrs Henniker. Now he asked her to let him have a photograph of the Major, in uniform, and told her, ‘he is to be framed with our other celebrities.’ 18

  In September 1895 Hardy fell half in love with another younger married woman, Agnes Grove. It was a less consuming experience than his love for Mrs Henniker and helped to distract him from it. Mrs Grove was born into an interesting family, her father General Pitt-Rivers, her grandfather Lord Stanley of Alderley, and her husband a good-natured country baronet who called her ‘my little pepper pot’ for her advanced views and determined character. Her brilliant aunt Kate died young, leaving a baby son, Bertrand Russell. Mrs Grove was in her thirties, with a brood of children, and was also set on becoming a writer on social questions, among them women’s suffrage. The Hardys were invited to the Pitt-Rivers’ for the week in September when they gave their annual open-air dance in Wiltshire. A warm night, soft grass and a full moon, with extra light provided by hundreds of lanterns strung in the trees, offered a magical setting, and Hardy and Agnes led a country dance together. He was as entranced as a child by the experience, and perhaps it was something boyish about him that made her allow him to hold her hand when they sat out together, listening to the music while others danced on. 19 Since Lady Jeune’s daughters were her cousins, he was quite at ease with her, and she had the confidence of a beautiful aristocratic woman of the world. She was also astute enough to see that her literary ambitions might be advanced by a friendship with Hardy.

  For him it was not so much a matter of replacing Mrs Henniker as adding another name to his pantheon. He needed a muse, the position Emma had once filled but did so no longer. Ideally his m
use should also be his mistress – as Mary Godwin became Shelley’s – and there is no doubt he longed to take hold of a woman and make her his own in defiance of the rules of the Church and conventional society. But Mrs Henniker had taught him a lesson by her cool, definite withdrawal from anything more than flirtation, and he had to settle for admiring beautiful women, taking his inspiration from them, accepting their flattery when offered without considering its motives too closely, helping them where he could, and taking pleasure in being with them, talking with them and, if he was lucky, getting a hand to hold. He was now fifty-five years old. When he looked at himself he was dismayed by what he saw: his hair receding and thinning, and his skin showing the creases of age. Yet his eyes remained bright, and he still aspired to a youthful look: the moustache with long twirled points carefully maintained, extended across each side of his face, announcing, I can be dashing and dangerous when I choose to be.

  His muses did not inspire him to flights of love, but there is one near-perfect short poem in which he talks about appearing old and feeling young:

  I look into my glass

  And view my wasting skin,

  And say, ‘Would God it came to pass

  My heart had shrunk as thin!’

  For then, I, undistrest

  By hearts grown cold to me,

  Could lonely wait my endless rest

  With equanimity.

  But Time, to make me grieve,

  Part steals, lets part abide;

  And shakes this fragile frame at eve

  With throbbings of noontide. 20

  Although God appears in the first stanza, death in the second and Time in the last, there is nothing portentous here. There is not a spare word either. His skin is wasting (and by suggestion also wasted, with no lover to caress it). He feels distress at other hearts not responding to his. If only his own were cooler, he could remain as calm as his coming death will one day make him – but it is not cool. Time has stolen his youth – like Milton’s ‘Time, the subtle thief of youth’ – but only a part of it, and the last two lines expand into a burst of feeling. The fragile frame shaken suggests a flight of birds alighting on a tree, full of life, energy and song. And the ‘throbbings’ are not only the beating of his heart, they are also the sensations of the flesh. It is not cool evening for him at all but sultry midday. When you finish reading the poem, you see that it is about sexual desire, and that it declares he is not old, but a man who aches to express his love through his body.

  During this period he was also in the middle of writing Jude the Obscure. Reading Jude is like being hit in the face over and over again. I think Hardy intended this, although he expressed surprise at the response of his earliest critics. The 1890s were the decade of Decadence; 1894 saw the scandalous trials and conviction of Oscar Wilde, with all the hysteria they engendered. Jude was seen by many as another attack on sound English moral values, and it was found intensely shocking when it appeared in November 1895: the serial version had preceded book publication and was, as usual, bowdlerized to an idiotic degree. But Jude is still distressing to read. If the Book of Job was partly its model, it was Job retold for a godless world that offers no final consolation or redress. And, although it told a different story from Hardy’s first, rejected, novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, it returned to the theme of a penniless young man with ambitions and radical ideas, and showed that Hardy’s anger had never been extinguished. Jude Fawley is orphaned, village bred, intelligent and aspiring, and he is repeatedly knocked off course as he tries to go forward in life. First there is his poverty, and the fact that he has no home or supporting community. There is no one to help him or advise him when he needs help and advice. Then there is the distraction of sexual desire, and the trap of marriage to an uncongenial wife. There is the indifference of the educational establishment to people of his class. Then the torment of meeting and loving a clever, congenial young woman, his cousin Sue, who would be a good life companion for him but that she is a tease, wanting to be loved while sexually unarousable, and emotionally a masochist, so that, although she does love him in her comradely way, she is prepared to leave him for a man she finds physically loathsome. The only sexual release available to Jude is with the wife of his youth, with whom he has nothing in common. Towards the end of the book, he says, ‘There is something external to us which says, “You shan’t!” First it said, “You shan’t learn!” Then it said, “You shan’t labour!” Now it says, “You shan’t love!” ’ 21 It is his own summary of his experience of life.

  Jude’s great-aunt has warned him from the first against marriage, saying the family history showed the Fawleys were not meant for it. He learns that his own mother committed suicide after separating from his father, and he makes an early unsuccessful attempt at suicide himself. On top of this Hardy piles bad luck, malign coincidence and then horror, when Jude’s son hangs his little half-brother and sister and then himself. That he intended the horror to hit his readers hard is plain from the manuscript, where there was originally only one younger child to be killed; a second child was added at a later stage. This is a clear instance of Hardy ‘coercing his plots’ and piling on the agony. Seeing it in the manuscript gives the reader who finds it pause, because it suggests a degree of relish. Hardy is saying, ‘Look! Look how bad things can be! Even as horrible as this!’

  But most readers have not consulted the manuscript, and Jude does not impress only by shocking. It speaks sense about the painful difficulties of life for the poor and intellectually aspiring who have lost their roots in any place and their faith in any god. When Ruskin College was founded in Oxford for working men some years later, people wrote to Hardy saying it should be called after Jude, something he was rightly proud of. 22 The book also offers an interesting corrective to any idea that the countryside is inherently cheering or consoling, by giving an unrelieved view of the dark side of rural life. There are no lush meadows and rivers, no great medieval barns as in Far from the Madding Crowd. Jude is seen first in a bleak and dreary upland Berkshire village in which many of the old cottages have been pulled down; even the ancient church has been replaced by an ugly modern one. In the process, the graves of the village forebears have also been destroyed, leaving the villagers without any record of the past. As a small boy Jude works for a farmer scaring birds in a vast upland field: ‘How ugly it is here!’ he thinks; and he is sorry for the birds, and troubled by the law of nature that makes cruelty to one creature kindness to another. There are no Wordsworthian lessons or inspirations here. His dream of becoming a student at Oxford is unattainable. He is trapped into marriage, too young and without love, and the marriage fails. Later he is broken by Sue, the woman he loves who is all nervous intelligence without sexual warmth. He becomes an itinerant stonemason, walking or taking trains from place to place, carrying a few possessions, never able to settle or make a secure life for himself, never finding true friends, turning to drink to forget his misery. In many ways his experience forecasts the brutality of life a century later, when economic migrants wander the earth, having lost their natural support systems of family and home, and encountering incomprehension, hardship, hostility and often early death. When Jude has lost everything he cares for, and the last dregs of his self-respect, he deliberately seeks his own death by exposing himself to cold and soaking rain.

  Hardy told Florence Henniker the book was ‘addressed to those into whose souls the iron of adversity has deeply entered at some time of their lives’. 23 He added that it was not a novel with a purpose and not a manifesto against marriage, as many critics took it to be, and he insisted that it was simply a story of ‘two persons who, by a hereditary curse of temperament, peculiar to their family, are rendered unfit for marriage, or think they are’. This point is made several times in the book. Warning words are spoken by Jude and Sue’s great-aunt Drusilla, who tells Jude, ‘The Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it never seemed to sit well upon us. There’s summat in our blood.’ 24 Later she tells Sue, ‘Ah – you’ll r
ue this marrying as well as he!… All our family do.’ 25 After her funeral, the two cousins talk about her idea again. ‘ “She was opposed to marriage, from first to last, you say?” murmured Sue. “Yes. Particularly for members of our family… She said we made bad husbands and wives. Certainly we make unhappy ones.” ’ 26 And Aunt Drusilla turns out to be horribly right, whatever the reason. Whether Hardy wanted us to believe in hereditary curses of temperament, or was describing a piece of witchlike rural superstition, is not clear. The most likely explanation is that, as with the witchcraft in The Return of the Native, his position was somewhere between belief and unbelief. In his own life, the person who warned her children against marriage was his mother, who advised all her children against it and told them to look after each other instead – advice disobeyed only by Thomas. 27 Neither the spirit in which she gave such advice nor her reason for giving it was ever disclosed, but by the time he came to write Jude part of him at any rate may have been ready to think his mother had been right.

  He told Mrs Henniker in the same letter that he believed he had written ‘a novel which “makes” for humanity more than any other I have written’. 28 It is true that Jude, boy and man, is drawn with a sympathy that makes readers like him, and feel the unfairness and anguish of his repeated disappointments. All the same, there is something of the manifesto about the book. Its determined grimness suggests that Hardy set out to shock and horrify people to force them to take notice of the things he found detestable in society. In Tess it had been the double standard and the general view that a woman once ‘fallen’ could not redeem herself. In Jude it was the class system’s denial of education and opportunity to the intelligent poor, and the resulting wastage, as well as the problems and pain of dealing with failed marriages.